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PREVIEW: Dead Army – Radio Frequency

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to lead an ever growing army of zombies across the land converting the dead to join you and destroying all others? How about controlling all the various types of zombies, including those with dynamite strapped to them? Well, if you haven’t there’s one game that might just put you in that way of thinking.

Status: Early Access

Developer: Skyjaz Games

Publisher: Skyjaz Games

Genre:RTS

Release date: TBA

Type: Single-player

Dead Army – Radio Frequency is a zombie controlling real-time strategy simulation game developed by SkyJaz Games that’s zombie-walking its way through Steam Early Access. Dead Army is still in development of course, so there will be more updates and smoothening off before release, but there’s enough there for me to jump in and have a general sort of route around, and see what the deal is.

The storyline unfolds as you play the game, but it revolves around scientists trying to create a super soldier but accidentally creating the mindless undead instead. There is also the further discovery that the undead can be controlled by a certain radio frequency, and how one scientist decides to get his revenge on the scientists who scorned him etc. etc. etc. It’s not an overly captivating storyline, but you know what? It doesn’t have to be. There’s enough story to introduce you to the new types of zombies and humans that arrive with regularity every level or so.

As sort of outlined above, the basic gameplay involves you controlling your zombie army. If your army kills a civilian, they’ll rise as a zombie to join your horde. There are police around too who will shoot at any zombies on sight. Weirdly though, when you take down a cop they don’t rise up and you don’t get a police-zombie. Maybe they took a serum to counter the effect or something.

So, apart from your undead army you can recruit a number of hero’s who are stronger than your run of the mill troops and have special abilities such as long range sniping or the ability to heal your other zombies.

Outside of the gameplay and story what’s Dead Army Radio Frequency like?

The graphics could do with a little polishing up. Some of the textures are a little heavy-handed but because most of the game is shot from a fair distance up you don’t really notice this until there’s a mid-game pop-up and on the title screen. These are all things I suspect will be improved as the development goes on.

The AI also requires a bit of work. You can be chasing some humans around the map for ages, while others will just casually walk towards the zombie horde. The police are also not as effective as the boys in blue should be. Personally, I would switch things so that the enemies were much stronger, and the colonists were a little more terrified. This would make you as a player rely on sheer weight of numbers to defeat the police. A bit of destructive environment wouldn’t go amiss either.

My overall impression of Dead Army Radio Frequency is that it is a great concept, in a similar vein to Dungeon keeper where you get to play the bad guys for once, but there’s more work to be done to tie this all up into a really outstanding game. That’s the great things about Steam Early Access. It gives the developers a chance to look at a game and what players think of it, and develop it accordingly. The biggest thing to take away from this is that Dead Army Radio Frequency is a unique concept, with a lot of promise. Let’s see what SkyJaz Games do with it.